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A letter to bonus-boy Levi upon his high school graduation
31 May 2022
From one compositionist to another …
I address you like this for a few different reasons. My Ph.D. is in “composition studies” and one of my graduate faculty has a music undergraduate degree and is an accomplished pianist himself. The composer of the sheet music here, George Walker, was the first Black american to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. As you know, he traveled a hard road as a Black man in this country, but he made that road himself, as we all do, despite the adversity.
But I’m not giving you this sheet music because you intend to major in Composition and Technology in the Music Department at UWM. I’m giving it to you because you already compose many things, I’m speaking figuratively and literally here, and composition, musically, lyrically, in writing, involves both experimentation and design: it’s creating roads.
A BFA, or Bachelor of Fine Arts, which is the degree you’d be awarded if you stay on this path, is a good degree to get. It opens a lot of possibilities to you and I think it would be fun and rewarding to work toward it.
But I want to emphasize that the degree you get doesn’t really matter in terms of your future. I think you might tend to get bogged down by details and even think that you’d somehow limit your future if you got a music degree, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Having a college diploma, of any kind, puts you in a different category than others and sets you up to go in any number of directions. It’s the “idea of the degree” itself that opens futures for people because with that idea comes a lot of assumptions. You are assumed to have certain characteristics just by virtue of attaining a college diploma. Do people who don’t go to college also have some of these characteristics? Sure, but not all of them, and they have to continually prove it in different ways. People with a degree just show the piece of paper they earned and their abilities and qualifications are accepted. It’s called “institutional capital,” which is a form of cultural capital. This kind of capital works just like money in our society: you trade on this cultural capital to get other things that you want and need in life.
So again, it doesn’t really matter what your degree is in; it’s that you have a degree. It symbolizes things in our society and opens doors. That said, I do think that as a compositionist you’d set yourself up with a lot of skills and abilities that people with, say, a biology degree wouldn’t have. The idea of composition is that you plan, experiment, implement, rethink, revise, make a new plan, and you keep on building the very road of your life.
Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” No matter what you do or where you go, there are no clear-cut paths in life, so please always remember that we make the road by walking it.
I love you, Levi. Congratulations on this high skool part. I look forward to seeing what road you make by walking next.
From one compositionist to another …
I address you like this for a few different reasons. My Ph.D. is in “composition studies” and one of my graduate faculty has a music undergraduate degree and is an accomplished pianist himself. The composer of the sheet music here, George Walker, was the first Black american to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music. As you know, he traveled a hard road as a Black man in this country, but he made that road himself, as we all do, despite the adversity.
But I’m not giving you this sheet music because you intend to major in Composition and Technology in the Music Department at UWM. I’m giving it to you because you already compose many things, I’m speaking figuratively and literally here, and composition, musically, lyrically, in writing, involves both experimentation and design: it’s creating roads.
A BFA, or Bachelor of Fine Arts, which is the degree you’d be awarded if you stay on this path, is a good degree to get. It opens a lot of possibilities to you and I think it would be fun and rewarding to work toward it.
But I want to emphasize that the degree you get doesn’t really matter in terms of your future. I think you might tend to get bogged down by details and even think that you’d somehow limit your future if you got a music degree, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Having a college diploma, of any kind, puts you in a different category than others and sets you up to go in any number of directions. It’s the “idea of the degree” itself that opens futures for people because with that idea comes a lot of assumptions. You are assumed to have certain characteristics just by virtue of attaining a college diploma. Do people who don’t go to college also have some of these characteristics? Sure, but not all of them, and they have to continually prove it in different ways. People with a degree just show the piece of paper they earned and their abilities and qualifications are accepted. It’s called “institutional capital,” which is a form of cultural capital. This kind of capital works just like money in our society: you trade on this cultural capital to get other things that you want and need in life.
So again, it doesn’t really matter what your degree is in; it’s that you have a degree. It symbolizes things in our society and opens doors. That said, I do think that as a compositionist you’d set yourself up with a lot of skills and abilities that people with, say, a biology degree wouldn’t have. The idea of composition is that you plan, experiment, implement, rethink, revise, make a new plan, and you keep on building the very road of your life.
Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” No matter what you do or where you go, there are no clear-cut paths in life, so please always remember that we make the road by walking it.
I love you, Levi. Congratulations on this high skool part. I look forward to seeing what road you make by walking next.